Tag: on writing

On writing: Conflict

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

Do you have a killer concept, a promising premise, a protagonist worth a damn, a goal worth pursuing, and meaningful stakes? Then you should ensure that your characters won’t blaze through your plot unimpeded. Don’t allow them to tell you who they are: force them to prove themselves.

A warning, though: don’t inject unnecessary conflict into your story; Western narratives have been plagued with such for decades. If you can remove an instance of conflict without crippling some plot point, and that conflict isn’t funny, then drop it.

  • Figure out what your characters want most, then put the things they fear most in their way.
  • Is there enough conflict to sustain a story? Freewrite possible conflicts based on what you know about your story.
  • How is a character who goes after a desire impeded, and how does that force him to struggle?
  • What is the central (outwardly visible) conflict in the story? Who or what is preventing your protagonist from reaching her goal?
  • What opposing goals of other people or entities in the story provide conflict?
  • How is the drama the product of the values and ideas of the individuals going into battle?
  • How is the force of opposition present, and well defined?
  • How is the concept tied in with the central conflict of the story?
  • Is there at least one actual human being opposed to what the hero is doing?
  • How do you tailor your conflict to create the highest stakes possible for your protagonist?
  • How does the conflict force the protagonist to take action, whether it’s to rationalize it away or actually change?
  • How does the force of opposition allow the protagonist to prove his worth?
  • Test the big problem regarding how it impacts your protagonist’s arc, either making him change or making him worse.
  • How are at least two constituents weighed against each other in this story?
  • What unresolved tension in the story would make the reader want to see what happens next?
  • How is the conflict stress-inducing and/or painful?
  • How quickly can you introduce the central conflict element in your story?
  • How do circumstances beyond your protagonist’s control fling her out of her easy chair and into the fray?
  • Can you put your hero in the last place he wants to be?
  • What is the biggest obstacle preventing your protagonist form reaching her goal? How can you make it much worse? How can it push her into despair and hopelessness before the climax?
  • What strong inner conflict is your protagonist dealing with? Come up with two things she must choose between, both unthinkable. Tell how that showcases your novel’s theme.
  • Who challenges the views, actions, and beliefs of your protagonist in a way that involves your thematic elements? Make their opinions even stronger with higher stakes and greater conflict.
  • How would this story be considered a war?
  • Can you add emotional friction? Competing egos? Status struggles? Clashes of styles and personalities?
  • Can you come up with at least five minor, different conflict components you can add to your plot that exacerbate the central conflict of your novel?
  • What conflicting, multi-layered emotions hidden beneath the surface could be at play?
  • How do the conflicts in the novel warrant strong reaction?
  • What big stuff goes wrong with your heroes’ plan?
  • Can your protagonist’s external goal be in conflict with his internal goal?
  • Do you bring in the threat of a clear, present and escalating danger, not a vague facsimile thereof?
  • How are the impediments your protagonist faces potentially too great to be conquered?
  • What can make the goal more dangerous, more impossible to be reached?
  • How are you mean to your protagonist? How do you hold her soles to the fire, even when she starts to squirm?
  • How would this premise generate external conflicts and twists that would bring the characters with things about themselves that they’d rather not see?
  • Can you make the conflict bigger, much worse? List some possibilities and their outcomes.
  • Spend time thinking about the central conflict element in your story and all the different ways it can raise ugly heads to threaten and upend your protagonist. Try to pit as many things against him as you can, and push the stakes so that what he values most is at risk of being lost.
  • Whatever your hero has to do, make it hard. Every task for your hero must be difficult.

On writing: Stakes

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

Do you have a killer concept, a promising premise, a protagonist worth a damn, and a goal worth pursuing? Then you should ensure that your characters gamble something meaningful on the outcome of their risky venture.

  • How is this story the record of how a character, through strength of will, fights with death? What combination of the three types of death (physical, professional, psychological) are at work in the story? Sum up the main plot with at least one of the three deaths woven into the summary.
  • Given how passionate the protagonist is about his goal, what is he willing to risk, what danger will he be willing to face, in order to reach the goal?
  • What are the things your protagonist loves and cherishes the most? Can you set up the conflict so that he stands to lose those as he goes after the goal?
  • How do you establish what does it mean for the character to achieve the goal stated for the desire line? The more the outcome affects your character, the more will be at stake. And the more that’s at stake, the more invested your audience will be.
  • When you think of high stakes to establish for your characters, how do the risks they take align with their nature, values and personality?
  • Can you make the stakes in your work even greater by adding a personal component, having them affect people we care about? In other words, this time make it personal. The more personal, the better.
  • If the protagonist does not succeed, what would be lost? Could he lose more?
  • Could it be for the protagonist that the thing at stake is what he values most?
  • How does the plot problem have a clear consequence that the reader can begin to anticipate from page one?
  • Who and what else will be adversely affected if the protagonist fails to reach his goal? Can you make it worse?
  • If at any point your protagonist can simply decide to give up without suffering great personal cost due to her inaction, consider that the story is wrong or insufficient.
  • How there will be something clear and definite that will occur if the protagonist fails or, worse, doesn’t take action? It can’t be vague, conceptual or iffy.
  • How can you make the reader care about the story based solely on those stakes?
  • What is the fight? How is it important and urgent enough for the reader to root for the hero to win?
  • How are the stakes measured by the value the protagonist puts on the thing at stake?
  • Is there a real-world, specific, impending consequence that this escalating problem will give my protagonist no choice but to face?
  • How would the reader feel the stakes, and what might be won or lost?
  • What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
  • Regardless of whether or not the protagonist achieves his goal, will the approaching consequence cost him something big, emotionally speaking?
  • How do you show clearly the consequences and price of success or failure and its ultimate effect on everyone involved?
  • How does the protagonist truly suffer to get through the story, both for the reader and for the character himself to care about what happens to him?
  • How will the character realize he’s probably going to die (physically, professionally, and/or psychologically)?
  • Does the protagonist find himself with no way out at some point in the story, making it the story not be on his terms?
  • How do you make the reader believe the threats in the story to your protagonist are real?
  • Make sure most of the characters involved in the goals have something to lose. Can you expand the stakes to all the characters?
  • How far can you muddle, push, exacerbate the situation to raise the personal and public stakes?
  • To increase the public stakes, meaning what impact will this story have on the world, ask yourself: how could things get worse than they already are? How could this matter more than it already does?
  • Make the external and internal stakes as big as they can possibly be.
  • How does the story walk us to the precipice of human experience and allow us to peer into the abyss?

On writing: My general rules

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

This post will include the rules I wished I had followed since I started writing seriously when I was sixteen years old. I will emphasize some points that my younger self resisted.

I shall update this post whenever I come up with something else valuable.

If your subconscious nudges you with some idea or imagery that feels important, determine if it falls into a piece you’re working on or that you intend to work on at some point. Pay special attention to the “seed ideas” that the subconscious rarely provides, and that emerge with such strength that you know in your bones they will sprout a full story. In those cases, stop whatever you’re doing and write down all the details that linger in your mind. Do not let those ideas go: they’re the best ones you will ever get. If you don’t write them down, you will end up forgetting them. Most of the favorite parts of my stories come from notes that I don’t remember having come up with nor written down.

If your mind presents you with some idea or imagery that feels important but can’t be assigned to any project, it’s not necessary to write it down. Plenty of these rogue suggestions resurface later, sometimes years later, tangled with other ideas or imagery that could be categorized. Let them simmer.

Your subconscious is the one entity in this world that you can fully trust. Like Cormac McCarthy put it, “[It has] been on its own for a long time. Of course it has no access to the world except through your own sensorium. Otherwise it would just labor in the dark. Like your liver. For historical reasons it’s loath to speak to you. It prefers drama, metaphor, pictures. But it understands you very well. And it has no other cause save yours.” Always pay attention to its advice.

As you work on a project, go through your notes for it with the goal of reordering them chronologically. If you aren’t sure about where in your story an event is supposed to take place, arrange them in order of escalating tension. Do this from time to time, because some notes will end up moving around significantly.

When you’re working on a scene or a chapter, go through your notes and isolate them in logical blocks that you should be able to coalesce in about five to ten minutes of freewriting. Add as many notes as necessary to that block so that you won’t need to know anything else about the rest of your story while you’re busy rendering that part of the scene.

Once that next block of the scene or chapter you’re working on contains all the necessary elements, render the block through freewriting. Do not ever sit down in front of your keyboard and try to come up with one word after another: that puts your conscious mind in control, the part of your brain that should only be in charge of putting together coherent sentences from raw material, and of revision. It will also end up making you hate the act of writing, which should be a labor of joy.

The way you force your subconscious to produce the raw material is through freewriting. Put on some mood-setting music, open videos and/or photos relevant to the block you will work on. I usually change the size of my windows in the PC to ensure that all the necessary parts fit on the screen at once. Then, while you play the notes in your mind as if they were part of a movie, type as fast as you can, coalescing what you’re sensing and feeling into a mass of raw material.

By “as fast as you can,” I literally mean it: banging your keys or repeating nonsense in case your brain can’t come up with some particular word, making enough grammatical and syntactic mistakes to make a teacher cry. Do not allow your fingers to stop. The goal is to bypass the slower conscious mind to access the much faster subconscious, the same way as you would while playing an instrument. You do not stop in the middle of playing a song because you don’t remember a specific note, or because you have just played the wrong one. If the end product of your freewriting session resembles the verbal diarrhea of a complete lunatic, then you’ve done it right: your subconscious isn’t sane, but it has survived for much, much longer than human beings have existed.

Once you end up with the raw material of a session of freewriting, let your conscious mind sieve through the outrageous nonsense, then arrange the fished-out meaningful words into coherent sentences.

Freewriting is also invaluable when you aren’t sure what details to produce out of a moment, or what feelings your point of view character would experience. Freewrite about it for a set amount of time, usually five minutes. In the process you will get the obvious out of the way, and your subconscious will provide some gems.

Beware the ladder of meaning. For example: entity > object > building > house > cottage > an English cottage with thatched roofs, a sprawling garden, and stone walls covered in ivy. Always try to include in your texts elements from the highest rung of the ladder of meaning. If you intend to include an element from lower rungs, justify its presence in the piece. Why would you mention an element that doesn’t warrant detailing?

If some sentence, or a whole paragraph, feels awkward, improve it until it doesn’t. If you can’t improve that element further and it still feels awkward, try to remove it from the text. If the text doesn’t start creaking, threatening to fall apart, leave that element out. If you have improved it to the best of your abilities and still feels awkward but you can’t take it out of the piece, forgive yourself and move on.

Do not ever leave in your story a sentence, or even a word, that’s not pulling its weight. Whatever you leave in that doesn’t need to be there detracts from the whole.

Base your sentences around specific nouns and vigorous verbs, both of which should generate imagery in your mind. Try to avoid forms of “to be” and “to have,” unless the alternative sounds more awkward.

Avoid clichés. A cliché is every single expression you have heard before. I don’t recall which books on writing said it, but it’s been proven that your brain doesn’t engage meaningfully with sentences it has read or heard a million times, the same way you don’t truly look at stuff you see every day. Your brain mainly reacts to surprise, in case it needs to fend off an attack. Your goal is to create something new with every sentence.

Show, don’t tell. What does that mean? When in doubt, ask “What’s the evidence of that?” If asking that question of a sentence or paragraph makes sense, then you’re telling. If it doesn’t, you’re showing. For example: “The woman was beautiful.” What’s the evidence that she’s beautiful? You’d go into specific details of her allure that would make your point of view character (important: not you) feel that she’s beautiful. And once you’ve added that explanation in, remove the sentence “The woman was beautiful.” You don’t need it.

You can violate any of the above rules if you’re going for a specific effect. For example, it’s not uncommon to use clichés (meaning any expression you’ve read or heard before) as part of your characters’ speech, because that’s what people do. You can also violate any of the above rules if the result would be funny.

Number one rule: offer the most meaning with the least amount of words. Don’t waste people’s time, starting with your own.

On writing: Desire line #2

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura1 Comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

Do you have a killer concept, a promising premise, and a protagonist worth a damn? Then you should determine the goal that your characters will pursue, and that will result in the plot of your story.

  • How is the story about this one problem that complicates everything else?
  • Though your heroes might initially perceive this challenge as an unwelcome crisis, it will often prove to be a crisis that ironically provides just the opportunity your heroes need, directly or indirectly, to address their longstanding social problems and/or internal flaws.
  • Does this challenge represent the hero’s greatest hope and/or greatest fear?
  • Your protagonist’s goal should inspire some kind of emotion. Anything relating to food, violence, sex or chaos is inclined to stimulate emotions at the base level. The most compelling emotion to evoke in writing is anger, so if you can include a bit of outrage, give it a try.
  • How specific can you make the desire? Is there a specific moment in the story when the audience knows whether your hero has accomplished his goal or not? You should be able to photograph the moment.
  • Are you sure the choices for the objects of desire aren’t wishy-washy? It shouldn’t be too nebulous, too intangible. Can you embody the desire in an object?
  • How is the desire a visible one, something substantial, not esoteric or emotional or spiritual? You should be able to describe your hero’s goal to someone in a way that they can see it played out in their mind as if on the silver screen.
  • How can you center the goal in the concept of your story?
  • See if it could be a story that plays more gradually as the hero realizes the unforeseen true nature of the conflict. This only works if the hero seizes what seems like a positive (albeit intimidating) opportunity in the beginning, without realizing how much conflict it will cause.
  • How do you make sure you have a single desire line that builds steadily in importance and intensity?
  • How is at the beginning the desire at a low level, so the importance of the desire increases as the story progresses?
  • How is it a single, escalating problem that your characters can’t avoid?
  • Are you sure the problem has a power to grow, intensify and complicate?
  • What prevents your protagonist from achieving his goal easily? Try to explain how the goal is difficult to achieve.
  • You want to convey to the audience just how big and important and impossible your hero’s goal is. The reason for this is that the more impossible the audience finds the task, the more doubtful they become that the hero will succeed.
  • Are you sure your chosen goal can sustain the entire novel from the first page to the last?
  • See if you can make the obstacle goal something hard to want to do. For example, defeating your sister instead of a random person.
  • How will your chosen goal explore the themes you want to include in the story?
  • The desire should be accomplished, if at all, near the end of the story. If the hero reaches the goal in the middle of the story, you must either end the story right there or create a new desire line, in which case you’ve stuck two stories together.
  • Decide whether or not, in detail, your protagonist succeeds in his external goal, and how either the character overcomes the external flaw or not.

On writing: Desire line #1

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura1 Comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

Do you have a killer concept, a promising premise, and a protagonist worth a damn? Then you should determine the goal that your characters will pursue, and that will result in the plot of your story.

  • Plot, in its simplest manifestation, is all about the protagonist’s thwarted goal. He wants something, and he can’t have it, so he keeps right on trying.
  • You need to give your character a quest, a journey to take, a problem to solve, a goal to strive for. In other words, a plot. Something that presents risk, has options, has opposition and stakes hanging in the balance.
  • What is the single, overarching question the story would answer? For example, “Will the good guys manage to reach Mordor and destroy the One Ring?”
  • Can it be one of these five basic types of goals?
    • The need to win (competition, the love of another)
    • The need to stop (someone, something bad from happening)
    • The need to escape
    • The need to deliver (a message, one’s self, an item)
    • The need to retrieve (a magic ring, a hidden or lost treasure, a lost love)
  • How strong could you make the goal, based on the following Maslow-like hierarchy of needs?
    • Survive (escape)
    • Take revenge
    • Win the battle
    • Achieve something
    • Explore a world
    • Catch a criminal
    • Find the truth
    • Gain love
    • Bring justice and freedom
    • Save the nation
    • Save the world
  • What kind of goal can I give my main character that will seem impossible to reach?
  • Every story is defined by what the protagonist wants. This external goal (the Thing He Wants Most) starts out as the story’s manifestation of ultimate pleasure (even if the story’s true source of “pleasure” is really the Thing He Needs Most). Naturally, the character is headed straight toward this font of bliss.
  • The protagonist must have a worthy goal (what he needs to accomplish during the story). The goal must be concrete and measurable. He must have a believable motivation to want to carry out his goal (along with a personal need behind the external motivation).
  • Do you know what your protagonist’s external goal is, the thing he’s trying to get? What specific goal does his desire catapult him toward? Beware of simply shoving him into a generic “bad situation” just to see what he will do. Remember, achieving his goal must fulfill a longstanding need or desire –and force him to face a deep-seated fear in the process.
  • Does your protagonist’s goal force her to face a specific longstanding problem or fear? What secret terror must she face to get there? What deeply held belief will she have to question? What has she spent her whole life avoiding that she now must either look straight in the eye or wave the white flag of defeat?
  • It always come back to: what do these events mean to the protagonist? What is her true goal? Knowing this will allow you to make her goal specific to her, rather than leaving it as a surface (read: generic) goal that we all have.
  • Is her goal tired up with a core need, a passion, a dream? Is it something she must get, have, stop, reach? Is her emotional nature and spirituality tied to that goal?
  • Goals aren’t necessarily straightforward. The ones that matter aren’t so much related to the events of the story, as they are related to the reasons why your protagonist participates in these events. The true objectives of your protagonists are based on their flaws and the things they need to overcome those flaws.
  • Is the problem capable of forcing the protagonist to make the inner change that your novel is actually about?
  • How will it make things happen that will force the protagonist to make his internal change, or fail at it?
  • To intertwine with the character arc, this goal needs to be an extension or reflection of something that matters to the character on a deeper level. How is the lie/flaw at the root of that soul-deep reason?
  • How does it bring the protagonist face to face with their worst fear, the force that is going to force them to face up their underlying flaw?
  • How does the lie/flaw play out in the character’s life, and the story, through the conflict between the Thing He Needs (the Truth) and the Thing He Wants (the perceived cure for the symptoms of the Lie).
  • How is he pursuing a goal or goals that are furthering their enslavement to their lies/flaws? They’re not pursuing happiness and fulfillment holistically by addressing the lie. Rather, they’re trying to get what they want in spite of their refusal to buck up and look deep into the darkness of their own souls.
  • Does the protagonist go on this journey to solve the desire line to recognize that what he wants stands in direct opposition to what they need?
  • What is the organic, escalating scenario that forces the protagonist to confront her inner issue? How does everything the protagonist faces, beginning on page one, spring specifically from the problem she needs to solve, both internally and externally?
  • How does the protagonist think that if he can just have what he wants, all will be well?
  • How does the protagonist want to fulfill the goal real bad?
  • How could that goal mean everything to the protagonist?
  • Does this challenge represent the hero’s greatest hope and/or greatest fear and/or an ironic answer to the hero’s question?
  • How does this challenge tell who the protagonist really is?

On writing: Protagonist #3

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura1 Comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

If you’ve been following my posts up to this point and you’ve done the necessary work, you should have ended up with a killer concept and a promising premise. Congraturation! But this story is still far from its happy end. The following notes, gathered years ago from many books on writing, focus on creating a worthy protagonist that will endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and that in the end will either emerge victorious or fail spectacularly.

  • Try to define specifically what the protagonist would be changing from.
  • Who is this person on the inside? What do they believe? What do they want? Where are they in their life, specifically? Your goal, as always, is to infuse what your protagonist has done with the internal reason why they did it. Never lose sight of this simple fact: it’s not just about what your protagonist did, it’s about why.
  • What does this character make sacred? How does that define the character?
  • How did the character benefit from adhering to that flaw? And what costs?
  • What is the fundamental character change of the hero? It’s what your hero experiences by going through his struggle. Weaknesses x Struggle = Change.
  • How is this character with certain weaknesses, when being put through the wringer of a particular struggle, is forged and tempered into a changed being?
  • You don’t need to know exactly how the story is going to end, but you do need to know what the protagonist will have to learn along the way, what her “aha!” moment will be.
  • Possible character arcs:
    • Young person challenging and changing basic beliefs and taking new moral action.
    • Character goes from being concerned only with finding the right path for himself to realizing he must help others find the right path.
    • From caring only about himself to rejoining society as a leader.
    • From helping a few others find the right path to forcing others to follow his path.
    • From helping a few others to seeing how an entire society should change and live in the future.
  • At the beginning of every story these elements are unconscious, then it’s possible to chart how those flaws are brought into the conscious mind, acted on, and finally fully overcome.
  • Their unconscious flaw is brought to the surface, exposed to a new world, acted upon; the consequences of overcoming their flaw are explored, doubt and prevarication set in before, finally, they resolve to conquer it and embrace their new selves.
  • The protagonist goes on a journey to overcome their flaw. They learn the quality they need to achieve their goal; or, in other words, they change. Change is thus inextricably linked to dramatic desire: if a character wants something, they are going to have to change to get it.
  • Start building the arc by starting at the end of the change, with the self-revelation, then go back and determine the starting point of the change, which is the hero’s need and desire.
  • What is the preworld / mirror moment / transformation? If you can’t build them from the idea, it’s likely not a good choice.
  • How does the key way your protagonist will change by the end of the novel tie in specifically with the premise and kicker?
  • If your protagonist would take pretty much the same action at both the beginning and end of the story, you know his Change Arc isn’t strong enough. This holds true for Flat Arcs as well. Although the character’s personal truth and integrity may hold fast throughout the story, he shouldn’t have the motive or understanding to act in the same way at the beginning as he will in the end.
  • How does the story, as the hero goes after the goal, challenge his most deep-seated beliefs?
  • The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed. One by one the resistances are broken. He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.
  • The protagonist’s superficial wants remain unsated; they’re rejected in favour of the more profound unconscious hunger inside. The characters get what they need. Expecting one thing on their quest, they find themselves confronted with another; traditional worldviews aren’t reinforced, prejudices aren’t reaffirmed; instead the protagonists’ worldviews – and thus ours too – are realigned. Both literally and figuratively we are moved.
  • How do you keep in the back of the audiences’ mind for as much of the story as you can the question “will the hero do the right thing, and will he do it in time?”.
  • If the hero doesn’t change for good, can you heighten the hero’s “might-have-been” factor and lost potential while showing that the hero’s actions are his responsibility?
  • Will the world change along with the hero? If so, how?
  • What do they dread will happen if they act against their flaw? What, in their minds, will they lose, materially and socially?
  • What will happen if your character does get what they most want in the world (but not what they need)? What unexpected problems will that bring?

On writing: Protagonist #2

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura2 Comments

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

If you’ve been following my posts up to this point and you’ve done the necessary work, you should have ended up with a killer concept and a promising premise. Congraturation! But this story is still far from its happy end. The following notes, gathered years ago from many books on writing, focus on creating a worthy protagonist that will endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and that in the end will either emerge victorious or fail spectacularly.

  • Who is your protagonist before the story changes him? Change him from what?
  • What is your protagonist’s flaw or flaws?
  • Is there a notable event in his past that has traumatized him?
  • Does your protagonist have an inner problem that’s impacting his life or the lives of people he loves?
  • In some cases, a protagonist’s flaw could be seen as a lie that hurts him, caused by a traumatic event that explains that character’s motivations.
  • Examine the premise to see if the lie/problem/flaw might already be evident in the conflict.
  • How “big” is your character’s flaw/misbelief? If you made it bigger, would you end up with a stronger arc?
  • How does the flaw or problem of the protagonist relate to the story at large?
  • How does the flaw prevent the protagonist from immediately solving his problem?
  • Could the flaw be exactly the opposite of the final self-revelation and/or moral change?
  • How have you transformed this person from a generic “anyone” plunked into a dicey situation, into a specific someone, who brought the situation on himself? Not “brought on” in the finger-wagging sense, but because it’s all the things we’ve already done in our lives that have, for better or worse, landed us where we are right now.
  • How is the “new world” of the story designed to bring the protagonist’s flaws to the surface?
  • How does he get worse regarding the flaw before he gets better?
  • How does his desperation to beat the oponent bring out the worst in him?
  • What makes your protagonist unique?
  • Have you created a protagonist who is in some respect larger than life?
  • Is there some quality or talent that will allow the character to do what others do not, to succeed where others would fail?
  • Does the hero use pre-established special skills to solve problems?
  • Ask what does the person, usually the protagonist, want, what he’ll do to get it, and what costs he’ll have to pay along the way.
  • Is the hero’s primary motivation for tackling this challenge strong, simple, and revealed early on? In high-jeopardy stories, the size of the motivation must match the size of the problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the motivation required for the hero to tackle it, and the bigger the risk of not tackling it. Ideally, the reward for doing it and the risk of not doing it will both be high.
  • How is what the character wants (conscious desire) versus what he needs (subconscious) at odds?
  • What conflicting emotions tear your protagonist apart? How could it be considered an interior war?
  • Could his inner conflict be way bigger than the outer conflict, acting as an amplifier to the outer conflict and making it much more significant?
  • What is the central inner conflict your protagonist is dealing with as it pertains to your concept? Can you increase it?
  • What would the protagonist have to overcome internally to achieve the goal?
  • How would your protagonist go through painful dilemmas?

On writing: Protagonist #1

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura1 Comment

#2

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

If you’ve been following my posts up to this point and you’ve done the necessary work, you should have ended up with a killer concept and a promising premise. Congraturation! But this story is still far from its happy end. The following notes, gathered years ago from many books on writing, focus on creating a worthy protagonist that will endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and that in the end will either emerge victorious or fail spectacularly.

  • Write down possible options for the hero’s weaknesses and change.
  • Can you center your story on a character blinded by a single-minded obsession, whose weakness is the flip side of her strength?
  • Can you have the protagonist desperately pursuing something?
  • Does he desperately want something and is willing to risk almost anything to get it?
  • Consider how sharp the point of the story will cut for each possible protagonist, in order to choose the better one.
  • The event you’re writing about should be the most important moment of your hero’s life, the most critical. If your story isn’t about the most important moment in your hero’s life, don’t write the story. Write about whatever was the most important moment in his life, because that’s likely to be more interesting.
  • How does the plot arise of the main character?
  • How does everything rest on your main character?
  • How does he have enough grit to possibly resolve the problem?
  • Could you make the protagonist someone very unlikely to achieve the goal?
  • How can the protagonist be the vehicle to showcasing the concept?
  • How many people can you involve and affect by her choices?
  • How does the protagonist’s past make what happens to him the moment he steps onto the first page of the story inevitable?
  • How would the protagonist’s past be a big part of the story’s force of opposition? How does it tell you what, specifically, your protagonist is against, both internally and externally?
  • How does this protagonist’s specific past determine not only what will happen in the plot, but how she sees her world, what she does, and most importantly, why?
  • Explain in broad terms how the gauntlet of the plot will test this protagonist.
  • Are you sure this character is the most compellingly conflicted in the story?
  • How would this protagonist’s transformation, his inner change, embody the point of the story?
  • How is this story the quest this protagonist has spent most of his life suiting up for?
  • How does the story force this protagonist to call into question deeply held beliefs?
  • What will the problems in the story mean to the protagonist? What specific plan will they topple? What internal fear will they force him to confront? What long-held desire will they give him no choice but to go after? Because your story isn’t about the external change your “what if” is going to put the protagonist through; it’s about why that change matters to him.
  • How is the protagonist about to walk into the next day of her life, which she believes will go according to plan, her plan, the one based on all the past experience, but it won’t, because the story doesn’t meet his expectations?
  • What are the protagonist’s plans that the story will upend, and why do they matter to him?
  • How would the story test his flaw/misbelief to the max, opening his eyes along the way, or, depending on the point you are making, not?
  • Does the protagonist require any noticeable personal growth to gain the inner strength to defeat the external antagonists? Use this to spark ideas and also figure out what type of arc he will have.
  • In the first half of a book, protags are generally trying to achieve an objective which allows them to continue on as they are. A proud character will try to preserve their dignity; a fearful character will give in to their fear and want to run away. In the second half, they generally begin trying to achieve objectives that will allow them to master their flaws.
  • Does the protagonist make significant decisions? Does he enact those decisions? If not, why not?
  • How would this story exist to serve this hero?
  • How is, in the end, this hero the only one who can solve the problem?
  • There needs to be a deeper reason why your heroes are the only ones who can solve this problem. Calling the cops should not be an option, whether or not a cell phone is available.
  • Could he, and other characters possibly, start on the edge of a crisis?
  • You can’t tell the audience who the hero is; you need to show them. The audience chooses the hero, not the other way around. The audience will choose the character who is trying the hardest to get what he wants.
  • Does the hero have (or claim) decision-making authority?
  • Do you have a compelling or unique take on character that can only enhance your premise?
  • Try to think outside the envelope. Take the idea you have for your protagonist and see how that looks when you make her astronaut, a nuclear physicist working to create an invisible force field, or a paranormal healer that can see people’s illnesses in their eyes.
  • Your heroes shouldn’t react to their situations in typical ways. Instead, heroes must respond to their challenge in their own unique way. That unique reaction is what makes the heroes. This is what the Everyman wouldn’t do. This is why this story happens.
  • Is the protagonist interesting and someone we could root for?
  • Will my reader experience empathy for my hero?
  • Why do you love your protagonist? And if you don’t, why do you intend to write about a protagonist that you don’t love?
  • How would he be both a winner and a loser? The audience wants to cheer and fear for every hero throughout every story.
  • How does he have a lot of badassery and a lot of vulnerability?
  • How would he be in over his head often?
  • Caring is only the first half of empathy, because as much as we feel for their flaws, we also need to trust the heroes’ strengths. This is the area where many beginners fall down on the job. Audiences are naturally inclined to reject heroes until they earn their investment. Your heroes need not be do-gooders or Earth savers, but they must be active, resourceful, and differentiated from those around them, even if it means they’re extraordinarily rotten.
  • How is the character uniquely vulnerable to the situation in which he found himself?
  • Can the character be relatively selfless and low in status? Are there more powerful Goliaths ranged against them?

On writing: Originality

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

If you’ve been following my posts up to this point and you’ve done the necessary work, you should have ended up with a killer concept and a promising premise. Congraturation! But this story is still far from its happy end. The following notes, gathered years ago from many books on writing, focus on an isolated aspect of developing a story before you delve into the nitty-gritty of structuring the damn thing.

  • No matter what aspect of writing we’re talking about, you need to find a unique take, a unique slant, a different way in that audiences haven’t seen before.
  • What is original within the story idea, what makes it unique?
  • How is the story different from all the others on the same shelf?
  • How can you make this idea more interesting than any other handling of the same concept by another author?
  • How does the originality speak for itself in your premise?
  • How is this material truly your own, of central importance to you?
  • How does it present novelty, challenge and/or aesthetic value?
  • What are other stories with a similar concept, and how can you make yours more interesting?
  • How do you tweak the norm or expected? How do you bring to that tired old plot idea something unexpected, something intriguing?
  • If other stories have touched on your themes before, how will your story offer a clever variation?
  • Evaluate how surprising and interesting your character’s quest to achieve his wants and needs is.
  • Is this single story line unique enough to appeal a lot of people besides you?
  • Describe as many of the story challenges and problems that are unique to your idea as you think of.
  • Will your story show us at least one image we haven’t seen before (that can be used to promote the final product)?
  • Look for where the idea might go, how it might blossom. Brainstorm the many different paths the idea can take, and choose the best one.
  • Ask “what if” about the story idea. It helps you explore your mind as it plays in this make-believe landscape.
  • Always go beyond the obvious choice. One of the keys to becoming a professional writer is not settling for the obvious choice, whether that choice be a concept, a character, a scene, or a line of dialogue. Good writers push past the obvious until they find something unique.
  • Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
  • Don’t resort to repeating stories you’ve already seen. Look for opportunities to twist things around and approach the idea from a new angle.
  • One of the things a writer must do is surprise the person who can’t be surprised.
  • Is anything promised by this idea? Does this idea generate certain expectations, things that must happen to satisfy the audience if this idea were to play out in a full story? Think of the obligatory scenes this premise demands, and concentrate on making them original. Brainstorm plenty of alternatives.
  • Ask what is an unexpected thing that could happen. What would be the expectations, and how can you throw them off?
  • Does the story contain a surprise that is not obvious from the beginning?
  • How would you let your characters surprise you, and therefore surprise the audience too?

On writing: Developing the premise #9

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura1 Comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

Are you happy with your concept? Then grow a premise out of it. Premises involve a task to be accomplished and a character that must accomplish it in the midst of conflict.

The following notes, gathered years ago from many books on writing, focus on revising the work you’ve done so far, particularly related to your premise, to solve all the glaring issues before you delve into the meaty parts of turning a premise into a full story.

  • Are you able to summarize your story in a few sentences, or a single paragraph?
  • Can you spot any inherent problems right at the premise line?
  • Having in mind that the premise is your prison, are you happy with the special world you’ve chosen?
  • Is the premise all that it could be? Does it seem too familiar? Is it too reminiscent of stories you’ve read before?
  • Are you sure the reader hasn’t encountered this story before, or if he has, this offers a new and intriguing twist?
  • Are you sure you have found your best story yet? What could be better?
  • Are you sure that the dramatic focus of this story connects with the concept that “spawned” the premise? How does it connect to it exactly?
  • Are you sure it doesn’t focus too much on character, without giving him or her something compelling to do?
  • Does your story rely on “real life” to present obstacles to the hero’s quest? In that case, it could lead to episodic narrative without a central spine.
  • Are you sure your story isn’t too small?
  • Have you made your story sound big and important?
  • Are you sure your story has enough potential for dramatic tension?
  • Can you ensure that there’s something more at stake in your story other than the hero’s happiness, redemption, or restoration of self-confidence, which may only be part of their character arc?
  • How do you have a concept with a kicker, conflict with high stakes, protagonist with a goal and theme with a heart?
  • Is your story at risk of lacking a compelling plot because it lacks a natural antagonist or villain?
  • Will it have unique imagery, buzz worthy scenes, and a few narrative surprises?
  • Are you sure you don’t have a split premise? Make sure there’s a single cause-and-effect pathway, or else it will feel like it’s all over the place.
  • If you are developing a premise with many main characters, each story line must have a single cause-and-effect path.
  • Premise is something you need to nail. It is the beating heart of a story. When you do nail it, it can be stated in a few short, glowing sentences. If it needs explaining, chances are it’s not yet focused enough. The drama needs to leap from it; the stakes need to be clear.